Go behind the scenes at Atlanta's Fox Theatre

Sunday

May 19, 2013 at 12:01 AM

One of the nation's last remaining movie palaces, Atlanta's Fox Theatre launched guided walking tours this spring. The 60-minute stroll illuminates the history of the Middle East-inspired vintage venue, which opened in 1929 and includes not just the theater and lobby but also its lavish ballrooms and ladies and gentlemen's lounges.

By ANYA MARTINFor the Herald-Journal

ATLANTA — One of the nation's last remaining movie palaces, Atlanta's Fox Theatre launched guided walking tours this spring. The 60-minute stroll illuminates the history of the Middle East-inspired vintage venue, which opened in 1929 and includes not just the theater and lobby but also its lavish ballrooms and ladies and gentlemen's lounges.Today, the Fox hosts Broadway tours, concerts, annual performances of the Atlanta Ballet's “Nutcracker” and the Coca-Cola Summer Film Festival, a contemporary and classic movie series. In the 1970s, though, this fairy-tale place with twinkling stars and indoor minarets barely dodged demolition and replacement by a high-rise office tower.Atlantans united in a Save the Fox campaign, with schoolchildren collecting coins and dollars to halt the wrecking ball. Today, it is the only historic theater in the nation to employ a full-time restoration department.“The Fox has been an Atlanta icon for 84 years,” said Molly Fortune, the Fox's director of restoration. “We wanted to introduce people to the history of this magical building and also invite them back to experience world-class entertainment.”Previous tours had been led by volunteers from the nonprofit Atlanta Preservation Center. The Fox brought the tours in-house to accommodate more visitors and support preservation efforts, Fortune said.Tickets to the summer movie series are $10. Audiences are treated to everything that a 1929 audience would have experienced — a sing-a-long with the “Mighty Mo” Moller organ, cartoon, vintage news reel and a feature on one of Atlanta's biggest movie screens, she said.

On a recent Saturday morning, about 20 tour-goers gathered in the Fox's arcade and entered by a side entrance used by patrons in 1929 when it first opened. After passing through the Spanish Room, the main concessions area during performances, the guide began recounting the Fox's remarkable history.The Fox was built by the Shriners, a fraternity of the Freemasons, for their offices, ceremonies and social events. Upon its completion, movie mogul William Fox leased the main auditorium, which seats 4,678 people, as a cinema, its primary function until the mid-'70s.The first stop on the tour, the auditorium, was designed to resemble the open courtyard of a Middle Eastern palace, and with its sky full of twinkling stars, it evokes the Arabian Nights. The Mighty Mo was not visible, but the guide pointed out where it rises up from the orchestra pit.

The tour then proceeded upstairs to the mezzanine via a hand-cranked elevator to the gentlemen's lounge, where men used to gather to smoke cigars between acts in a Moorish coffee house environment accented with red and gold, Tiffany lamps and a hooded fireplace. The Egyptian art deco ladies' lounge across the lobby is inspired by King Tutankhamun's tomb, an example of the “Egyptomania” inspired by its discovery in 1922.Next up were two more highlights, generally seen only by attendees lucky enough to attend special functions. A relaxation area for the Shriners, the Grand Salon's magnificent ceiling and chandelier were covered up for cinema operator office space; they were rediscovered and restored after the Save the Fox campaign.An art deco interpretation of the great temple at Karnak, the Egyptian Ballroom features brightly colored lotus-topped columns, winged-scarab friezes, hand-stenciled hieroglyphs, a starry ceiling reminiscent of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and a bas-relief of Pharoah Rameses II subduing a conquered enemy.The tour continued for a sneak peek into a kitchen filled with the buttery aroma of popcorn, where the guide pointed out a massive wooden-door original ice box that's still in use.The final destination was the balcony, which offers panoramic views of a whimsical bridge, complete with streetlights, that arches over the stage. The guide also drew attention to a back section at the top with limited seating for African-Americans during segregation.The Fox was the first theater in Atlanta to be desegregated, when the Metropolitan Opera announced it wouldn't play there otherwise in 1962.With such amazing architecture and so many design details, the most difficult decision was what to not feature on the tour, and some tough choices had to be made, Fortune said.For example, some Fox fans might be disappointed that the downstairs lounges aren't included, but their lack of access for disabled tour-goers led to their omission, she said.But don't expect the Fox tours to remain static. The restoration department will constantly hone the script to improve the experience, she said.“We recently discovered that the Fox sits on Fortification K, which served as the last protection of Atlanta from General Sherman's approaching army,” she said. This fact is being incorporated into the tour, she said.

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